The Beautiful Game

It was not that long ago that football and not cricket was the number one sport that occupied the hearts and minds of the general Bangladeshi public. 

One only has to go back to the 1980s to recall a time when footballers were bigger stars and likely bigger earners than cricketers, and it was not until the 1990s that cricket began to take off in earnest as a popular sport in this country.

All that is ancient history now, of course, and for the new generation of Bangladeshis it may be almost impossible to imagine a time when this country was not cricket-mad.

However, the recent imbroglio with respect to Mustafizur Rahman’s defenestration from the IPL and the subsequent failure of the ICC to accommodate the Bangladesh request to have its matches switched to Sri Lanka, resulting in Bangladesh withdrawing from the T20 World Cup have brought into sharp relief the jeopardy associated with playing a sport that is financially dominated by one country.

As the adage goes, whoever has the gold makes the rules, and in the case of cricket this is India, which accounts for some 80% of the revenue generated by the sport. This makes India the indispensable cricketing nation and ensures that in any conflict they are almost certain to get their way.

Cricket today exists largely to serve the Indian national ego, as it remains the one sport where they can claim to be a world power. 

In the country’s drive to represent itself as a power on the global stage, one notable mismatch between its self-image and its global ambitions remains sports.

Even China, with its hosting of the 2008 Olympics and increasingly impressive medal hauls in the years since then, has been able to use the sporting world as a way to demonstrate its rising heft on the global stage.

Not so, India. It is only in cricket that India can project itself to the world as it sees itself, and the reason is not hard to see.

In the first place, India’s dominance of cricket comes from the fact that so few countries play the sport to begin with and that for the countries with established sporting pedigrees that do play it, it is not the number one sport.

Secondly, since India is so financially dominant, what India wants in cricket, it gets.

Which brings us back to the question of how Bangladesh ought to navigate these tricky waters. 

There is an obvious risk in putting all of our sporting eggs in this one basket, as the recent T20 World Cup fiasco has made apparent.

It is clear that India is going to continue to use cricket as a geo-political cudgel and that Bangladesh can expect no favours from an Indian cricket board helmed by the curiously unqualified son of the virulently anti-Bangladesh Indian home minister.

Bangladeshis love cricket, and of course we will continue to play it and watch it. But there is no reason why it needs to occupy such a central role in the national imagination which in turn translates into funding and attention.

The time has come for us to once again turn our attention and divert our resources to a truly global world sport: football.

Of course it has not escaped our attention that this sport is one where Bangladesh performs even more poorly than it does in cricket and that we are far further from the pinnacle of football than of cricket. 

We are not qualifying for any football world cup any time soon, and even qualification for the Asian Cup would be a significant milestone for the men’s team.

That said, our women’s team has qualified for the Asian Cup and is going from strength to strength. And the men have recently defeated India and are slowly improving, with the addition of players such as Hamza Chowdhury and the Sullivan twins to the side. 

But the main point here is that although Fifa is in many ways just as venal as the ICC, it is equal opportunity venality: Bangladesh will not be penalized by the global body and the sport cannot and will not be used as a geo-political cudgel against us.

Let us therefore turn our attention away from cricket and towards the world’s true global game, the beautiful game, football. 

One final reason is that the game is far more democratic than cricket, requiring only a ball to play, and not expensive equipment. 

Had we continued to focus our attention on football since the 1980s instead of diverting our resources to cricket there is no saying where we might be today.

But it is never too late. It is time to return to our first love.

Football and not cricket is where the nation should expend its limited sporting resources and imagination, and ascending the ladder of world football will be a far more creditable and worthwhile endeavor than doing the same in cricket.